Invisible - Jonathan Buckley

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the building site, illuminated by banks of gas mantles, and Croombe marvelling at this nocturnal scene, as he would marvel at the completed Grand Hôtel one year later, when he would sit in the Salle des Fêtes, with Sandrine, amid an infinity of reflected gaslights.

      Back in the hall, still under the influence of his reverie, he looks up at the galleries that Croombe built around the hall in the year he bought the hotel. Up there, in front of the bust of Prince Albert, Adelina Patti one afternoon sang an aria by Rossini, impromptu, to an Italian family that was gathering downstairs, making ready to depart for the church, for a wedding. He follows the cascade of the staircase from the upper floor to the hall, tracing the spirals of wrought-iron ivy under the sinuous black handrail, admiring the way the spirals unwind into looser strands as they tumble down the stairs. In something like a gesture of consolation, he places a hand on the rail.

      Seated at the reception desk, he once again reads the letter he has written to Stephanie:

      You ask how I’ve been. I’ve been all right. I have a good job. I like where I work and the people I work with, and that’s more than most people can say, I suspect. But I have to admit it’s been difficult, never seeing you or speaking to you. It’s tempting, very tempting, to pick up the phone right now. To hear your voice – I’ve wanted that so often. How do you sound, I wonder? You were a child last time you spoke to me and now you’re a young woman. It will be wonderful to hear you. A minute from now I could be listening to your voice, but I can’t do this – I mustn’t do it – until you’ve spoken to your mother. Nothing could please me more than to see you straight away, but we must take everyone’s feelings into account. Why don’t you talk to her and then give me a call? The number’s on the top of this letter. I’m here most of the time, Monday to Sunday.

      Actually, the Oak will be closing down very soon – less than three weeks from now, in fact. It would be nice if you could come down here for a day or two, to see where I’ve been working all these years, while you’ve been going through school. There’s a pool in the basement, a huge bath of mineral water. You won’t ever have come across anything quite like it. I’ll put a leaflet in with this letter so you can see what I mean.

      I would love to see you, Stephanie. Every day I’ve thought about you. I’ll stop now, otherwise I’ll get embarrassing, and you won’t want to come down here after all.

      Jack Naylor comes in from the garden, carrying a bottle of beer by its neck. ‘Evening, Mr Caldecott,’ he says, swinging the bottle behind his back. ‘Working late?’

      ‘Odds and ends, Jack,’ he replies. ‘Odds and ends.’

      ‘Need me for anything?’

      ‘No, Jack. Thank you. I’ll be off home in a minute.’

      ‘I’ll say goodnight then, Mr Caldecott.’

      ‘Yes. Goodnight.’

      ‘Goodnight,’ says Jack, crossing to the room that was once the office of the telegraph clerk.

      For the last time he reviews what he has written. It is inadequate, but this is only the beginning, he tells himself, putting it into an envelope with a leaflet for the Oak.

      From an inner pocket of his jacket he removes the note he has written for the morning: a copy of the Daily Mail should be put on Mr Gillies’s tray, who would like a breakfast of two fried eggs and thickly sliced ham, with well-toasted bread and strong coffee; a copy of The Times should be left at Mr and Mrs Sampson’s table in the breakfast room – it is their wedding anniversary, so congratulations might be offered; Mrs Ainsworth dislikes cut flowers, so there should be no vase on the Ainsworths’ table. He takes a paper clip from the wooden tub on the desk and attaches the memo to the cover of the register. From the glass door, under the elegant gold lettering, his weary face regards him. He turns off every light in the hall except the lamp above the desk.

      Looking at the stairs, he recalls the sight of the workmen as they chipped away the concrete in which the staircase had been encased, exposing inch by inch the wrought-iron ivy. Giles Harbison had come down from London that afternoon. Stooped under scaffolding, they admired the panels that nobody had expected to find: the tennis game, the croquet match, the archery contest. They went to the terrace, where Giles produced a pack of H.Upmann cigars and lobbed one to him. Sitting on a sack of sand, wearing white paper overalls that were too small for them, they smoked their cigars and looked at the rainwater pooling on the tarpaulins that covered the flower beds.

      From Jack’s room the sound of snoring emerges, a forthright noise, like the snoring of a bad actor. Looking through the crack between the door and the jamb, he observes Jack asleep on the camp bed. He has wound his jacket tightly and lodged it under his neck as a pillow roll, which has tilted his head back so that his nose and chin and Adam’s apple form three sharp little peaks in a row. His mouth gapes as if an oxygen mask has just been taken off him. Soundlessly he pulls the door shut.

       two

      On a big white chair, opposite the man and woman who are presenting the show, sits an actress whose face is on the cover of a magazine this week. Behind the man, on a big screen, the actress is dressed in a nurse’s uniform. They all look round at the screen, and the picture begins to move. An old man is lying in a hospital bed, with a white plastic curtain around him. Tightly he grips the nurse’s arm, then lets it go. On the screen the actress is crying; watching her cry, the woman presenter puts down her sheet of paper and looks as if she might start crying too. Facing the screen, the actress touches her hair nervously; she has very long fingers, with nails as pale as cuttlefish bones. Her watch is the size and shape of a lemon half.

      Eloni pours the water over the tea bag. ‘Yes, totally, totally,’ the actress answers, making her eyes big, like a young girl’s. She pulls at the hem of her tiny skirt and the man looks at her legs, which are shapely and bare and very smooth. The actress puts her fingertips on her face. ‘I was like, I’m sorry? Excuse me?’ she says, shaking her head in bewilderment, and then she laughs, and the man and the woman both laugh with her.

      ‘I’m sorry? Excuse me?’ Eloni mimics, buttering her toast. From her window she looks down into the back yard, at the rusting drums of cooking oil and the bin of meat wrappers and the mound of squashed cardboard boxes, on which the pictures of tomatoes have been turned milky by the sunlight. Even with the window shut the room smells bad, because of the blood on the wrappers and the bucket of bones in the corner of the yard, which the cats get into every night, knocking the lid off. And there are big patches of trodden food on the tarmac, a stinking grey mud of vegetable leaves and peel and scraps of rind that never gets scraped away. She would complain, but that might get her into trouble, or she could offer to clean the place, but that might be the same as complaining. She takes the air freshener from under the sink and shoots a cloud of sugary rose scent into all four corners of her room.

      Before leaving for work at the Oak she irons her best blouse and the overall she wears at Burgerz. She opens her purse. It contains only coins, so she takes a £10 note from one of the plastic wallets she keeps underneath the mattress at night. She wraps the wallet tightly again, binding it with rubber bands, then extracts the other one and takes them both to the sink, and there she stuffs them into the tin of tea bags, where no thief would think of looking. On the television an expert in something to do with families is frowning deeply as he listens to a phone call from a woman in Liverpool, who has some problem with her husband. The blouse has cooled enough to put it on. She turns back the bed sheets, then switches the television off. At the door she stops to kiss the photograph of her parents, and picks up the sheaf of keys.

      This is her favourite time of the day, when the air still has a taste of dew and the whole of the High Street lies in a deep, moist shadow. Up on the highest roofs there are patches of buttery sunlight and the pale blue sky above them is as pure a colour as any precious stone. It is cool in the shadow, but the cloudless sky and the sunlit roofs are promises of the warmth of the approaching day. Singly, at an easy speed, the cars pass by, slipping between the buildings at the end of the street like fish between boulders.

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